The Stork Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

doing this show instead of being out there in the job market." She watched him fill in a long phrase all the way down the right-hand side of the puzzle with that look of triumph he always wore when he deciphered one of those. "He's right, you know. We're truly blessed. And we can't forget that." Her voice was becoming what Shelly always called "soggy." The way it got when she was feeling awed by how far they'd come in their careers.
    "Uh-oh," he said, looking up at her. "When you start sounding like Jerry Lewis on the telethon it means you've just volunteered our services to some fund-raiser so we can prove to the world and ourselves that we're thankful. Which one was it today?"
    "The benefit show for the Writers' Guild fund, and they need us right away. It'll be good for us. We're always so busy with casting sessions and network meetings we hardly ever get to sit and write anymore. This'll keep us fresh."
    "Can't we just use deodorant?"
    "Oh come on," she said, taking the Arts and Leisure section out of his hand. She was glad to have a reason not to go back to looking at some set designer's elevations for next week's show. She much preferred to plop a brand-new yellow legal pad on Shelly's desk and one on hers, divide several sharpened Blackwing 602s between them, and say, "Gentlemen, start your pencils." This was their favorite part of working together. Finding their way to an idea, moving it along, exploring it, turning it every possible way, or as Shelly liked to tell the writing staff, "You take a germ and spread it into an epidemic."
    "Okay, let's see," he said, planting his feet on the floor and twisting back and forth in the reclining chair the way he always did. "The Writers' Guild. Here it is. What if a husband-and-wife writing team realize that nobody wants to buy their material anymore, so they decide to make a suicide pact and kill themselves?"
    Funny, Ruthie thought. Already it has promise.
    "But of course," he improvised, "they have to leave a note. And since they're writers it has to be a great note. So they start to work. The husband sits at the typewriter; the wife paces. Suddenly the husband says, 'I've got it! We'll open the suicide note by saying "Au revoir, heartless universe." ' "
    Ruthie knew exactly where he was going and she jumped in. "But the wife sneers and says, 'Are you nuts? That stinks! You can't open a suicide note without saying "Farewell, cruel world." ' "
    Shelly was really working it now. "The husband laughs a mocking laugh and says, 'That is so kicked. I've heard it a million times.' "
    "Which infuriates the wife." Ruthie put her feet up on her battered old desk, sat back and thought for a minute. "So she turns on him . . . she's always been a shrew, and she says, 'Oh yeah? Well, I happen to think it makes the point better than "Au revoir, heartless universe," which like most of your ideas is completely phony.' "
    "The husband is hurt," Shelly said, "but he's going to be a martyr about it, so he gets very tight-lipped and says, 'Fine. Let's go on. We can come back to the salutation later.' "
    " 'What later?' the wife shrieks. 'There won't
be
any later! Don't you remember? We're going to be dead.' "
    "And he says, 'Yeah? Well, if we open with "Farewell, cruel world," we'll be
worse
than dead. We'll never work in this town again.' Hah!" Shelly laughed a cackle of a laugh at his own punch line.
    "Funny," Ruthie said, taking her feet off the desk, sitting forward in her chair and looking pleased. She loved this man. Still found him so entertaining, so clever, so much the perfect counterpart to her that all the years they'd been hidden away in dimly lit closetlike spaces to write and produce shows were paradise for her just because they were together. And she'd felt that way about him since the night they met, eighteen years ago.
    It was in summer stock in Pennsylvania when they sat lit by the summer moon on the big wooden steps of the White Barn Theater, where Ruthie was an apprentice and